From quantum hard drive to foliated manifold

One major open problem in quantum information theory is how to build a quantum hard drive, i.e. a quantum system that can store quantum information reliably for a long time without active error correction. No completely satisfying solution to this problem has been found, but in the search a whole new class of quantum many-body models have been discovered with exotic properties never seen before. This new class of models, dubbed the “fracton” models, have point excitations that cannot move freely, a robust ground state degeneracy that increases with system size, and slow dynamics even without any disorder. In this talk, I will introduce some of the most important fracton models and present a systematic framework for characterizing their universal properties. By realizing that the properties depend on the foliation structure of the underlying manifold, we reveal the hidden equivalence relation between many seemingly different models and identify the direction of search for new features.

Speaker: Xie Chen, Caltech